5/30 Chapter 9—Choosing Adjectivals

Here is a sentence from my most recent draft that has a lot of commas [that] I’m not sure are working correctly.
(Is the above sentence a case where I don’t need “that”? I’ll rewrite it this way: “I’m not sure that the many commas in this sentence from my most recent draft are correct.” Well, this change doesn’t lead with the introduction of the thing/the sentence, so the prepositional phrase “from my most recent draft” makes the sentence a little clunky. Looking back at Kolln, I see that she says {I just started that phrase with SHE, but realized that I am the one looking back} that “that” can be omitted if it doesn’t cause any confusion (197)).

Anyways, back to this sentence!:

OLD: “For this study then, I focus on the rhetorical strategies, or perhaps more appropriately the rhetorical peculiarities of History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, as it was published.”
NEW: “For this study then, I focus on the rhetorical strategies—or perhaps more appropriately, the rhetorical peculiarities—of the crafted, published version of History.”

In this change, I wanted to emphasize the rephrasing of “rhetorical strategies” to “peculiarities”, so I set off this appositive (is that what we’d call it? Peculiarities modifies or further defines the object “strategies”) with a dash instead. Kolln says that the dash or colon puts emphasis on the appositive, which is what I wanted to do here. As for that last phrase—“as it was published”—I’m not sure if it would need to be set off with that comma, but I’m thinking it doesn’t. However, I wanted to change it because in the old version, this is where the emphasis lands. Since I am trying to move past readings of History that don’t use the published version, setting off that phrase keeps it too separated. So I moved the adjective published before the noun and added "crafted" (for emphasis and repetition I’m trying to weave into the paper throughout) and set them off with a comma so it’s clear that they both are independently modifying “version.” I like this change quite a bit, though I’m not sure if I need that comma between “appropriately” and “the.”

***I found this chapter to be difficult to read; I thought there was no chance I would be able to spot this stuff in my writing without pouring over the chapter. It's crazy that in writing the first sentence of this post that I was suddenly aware of the way it was going together and questioning automatically if it was 'right' or the most effective it could be. Sweet.